A charity run by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leader in the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism whose group is based in B’nei Brak, also known as the Israel’s “Corona Capital” because of all the infected people there, is running a scam that’s perhaps the worst one we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The group says that anyone who donates NIS 3,000 (roughly $836) will be granted complete protection from COVID-19 by way of an amulet and blessings.
When the plague’s wrath subsides, and the rest of Israel returns to its routine far from ultra-Orthodoxy’s ghettos, some within the ghettos will ask themselves two questions.
The first question will be how come ultra-Orthodoxy’s highest living authority, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, overruled the government’s order that all educational institutions be shut, and ordered instead all ultra-Orthodox schools and yeshivot to remain open.
… Then they will ask the second question: who maneuvered the ultra-Orthodox community into the cramped ghettos where most of its families live? Why does Bnei Brak, with 23,700 people per square kilometer – almost twice Gaza’s 13,000 – have to be among the world’s 10 most crowded cities?
… Yes, many of his followers, probably most, will not be fazed by their leader’s misjudgment and aloofness, but a critical mass will ask not only how he erred so colossally, but how he made his reckless decision, consulting no one, possessing no relevant knowledge, and overruling a battery of experts.
Once they ask this basic question, ultra-Orthodox Israelis will conclude that their sage was not equipped to make the ruling that 10 days later he was compelled to reverse.
And those who undergo this epiphany will then question everything else they have been made to do, like deprive their children of the general education and military service that threaten their rabbis’ rule of the ghetto they built; the ghetto where, the day corona invaded, ultra-Orthodox Israelis learned they are religiously blinded, socially chained and medically trapped.
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That last part – about change – is wishful thinking. A kind of generational mental retardation has been accomplished among these groups; coupled with an embrace of authoritarianism and masochism, it represents one hell of a potent, toxic brew.
But props to this writer for going there – for the language of maneuvering Jews into ghettos. Yikes.
As one of Washington DC’s highest-profile orthodox rabbis is released early from a six-year prison term (coronavirus), here’s a quick revisit of Rabbi Freundel’s 52 counts of sexual perversion against orthodox women in the ritual bath (scroll down). And here’s a look at the larger place of the ritual bath in female orthodox Jewish life, and in our current pandemic.
[B]eginning on the days when she anticipates her period, a husband and wife are forbidden from having any sexual relations until seven days following the end of her period. Considering orthodox law states that a period’s duration is a minimum of five days, this typically spans about two weeks or longer, depending on whether her post-menstrual discharge cooperates. In short, this means that for about half of every month, all aspects of an orthodox woman’s life, relationship, sexuality, and emotional health, are dictated by her vaginal discharge…
While the woman is required to count seven clean days before she may immerse herself in a ritual bath (mikvah) prior to reuniting with her husband, it’s not only a matter of days or time waiting. The woman must take an active role to ensure she is “clean” by wearing only white underwear and conducting self-examinations of her vaginal canal with special white cloths twice a day, every day, before sundown. The white cloth is inserted into the vagina so that any fluid or discharge is absorbed. The first examination of the seven days requires the cloth to be left in for about an hour, even if the woman is out of the house, and it is usually quite painful…
If during the seven days any of the examination cloths contain even a tiny spot darker than tan, or a spot on her underwear bigger than a penny and darker than tan, she must take the underwear or cloth to a special rabbi for further evaluation. This Rabbi will then examine the color to determine if it is light enough for her to keep counting, or if it’s too dark or too red tinted such that she must begin counting the seven clean days over, even if it is day 7.
Okay then! Now – what about the bath and the epidemic?
Well, even with all that rabbi-sniffing, the orthodox woman still can’t do the deed until she goes to the ritual bath: “[W]omen must visit the mikvah.” That’s must, babe.
(Does it get even kinkier than this? Don’t ask.)
But things like common baths are notoriously germy (the subject is an excellent vector through which to clarify the meaning of irony), and you desperately want to stay away from them at a time like this. “[W]omen are understandably petrified of going to mikvah: In order for the immersion to count as valid, you must immerse your entire naked body, so that the water touches you completely. One of the main ways of transmission of coronavirus is by touching surfaces that have the disease – and some people may have coronavirus and be asymptomatic, in which case they might show up to mikvah.” But… you MUST use them!
“There are a lot of fixtures of Jewish life that Jews can actually live without,” Rivkah Slonim, a Hasidic woman who has written and lectured extensively about mikvah use, told me. “We can be without synagogues. We can be without a Torah scroll. We cannot, in Jewish law, move forward as a community … without a mikvah.” Immersion is a commandment that comes directly from the Torah, and the punishment for violating it—being cut off from God—is severe...
Although people outside of the Orthodox community might say that these women should just stay home, going to the mikvah is not optional in the way that praying together in synagogue or attending family gatherings is, according to Ruth Balinsky Friedman, a clergywoman at Ohev Shalom, an Orthodox synagogue in Washington, D.C. “I very much understand the impulse to see religion as more symbolic—something that we do when we’re able to, but in a time of crisis, we put aside,” she told me. But “you can’t cancel” the commandments governing sex, she said. “That’s the word of God.”
So you go, girl! Get in there, get infected, pass it on to the old folks and the young. None of this symbolic shit when it comes to the sexual filth of women. That’s the word of God.
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Useful background on the ultraorthodox mind:
[They] follow literally the biblical model in which God controls and does everything in history. They firmly believe that as long as humans please God by doing mitzvot, God will defeat their enemies and grant them victory… [Many of their leaders] dismissed medical considerations because God controls every detail of history…
In the coronavirus case, this policy – which totally fails in reality − was applied to the community. The consequences are devastating… [T]he virus [, some of their leaders told them,] is a punishment for lashon hara (harmful gossip speech); people should stop and repent, and the plague would stop…
Some Haredim allowed themselves to be exposed to the coronavirus because God would protect them. Many Evangelicals around the world have done the same. Given the natural laws and medical evidence of a pandemic, this behavior is nothing but magical thinking. Magic claims that through certain words or actions − in this case, religious faith/behaviors − God is “compelled” to do what the practitioner wants.
… The sad outcome of a lack of secular education is that people more easily slip into pre-modern, magical thinking. The Haredi penalty for grasping at magic is greater contagion… [T]he average Haredi Jew lacks understanding of the serious threat of the coronavirus and the urgency of taking preventive actions.
Unfortunately, the Gedolim − the Torah greats − who make the rulings that guide [haredi] behavior are just as uninformed as their followers. This explains their delayed and initially counterproductive responses to the threat. The community has paid a terrible price for its leadership’s ignorance of science and secular knowledge.. . [D]eprived of essential knowledge, mired in poverty [the haredim are now uniquely] vulnerable to disease.
As a few op/eds defending covid-flouting haredim straggle out of the gate, UD makes it a point to read them all.
They run the gamut from completely nuts to completely nuts.
UD has to read them for you because she knows you won’t read them. And why won’t you? Let us count the ways.
It’s just a few primitifs scattered here and there in the world… Maybe you saw Unorthodox and you know they treat their women like shit, but ladeedah… there but for the grace of god full stop. You’re vaguely aware welfare fraud rages and yeah ok their schools are a national disgrace but meh. The world is full of problems. Viewed from an anthropological lens, these people are certainly… interesting…
Oh, and here’s the most important reason of all. Play it again, Sam.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a person’s religious faith… these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I’m worried that our religious discourse – our religious beliefs – are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
Even when social practices are getting us killed, we don’t criticize them because they’re religious. Thus, indignant defenders of the haredim point out that these people live in appallingly substandard conditions, packed into tiny apartments without access to televisions, computers, or any news of the outside world, and that they get all of their instructions for how to live every aspect of their lives from a rabbi. These writers seem to believe that they are successfully arguing that since the haredim’s creation of some of the world’s hottest viral zones is simply an epiphenomenon of their faith, we are vicious anti-religionists to criticize them. But listen up, O Israel:
Haredi insularity, Haredi disregard for health authorities during a pandemic, Haredi poverty and population density — all the factors that render them especially vulnerable to the virus, and through them everyone else — are ultimately a choice. There are no external or environmental factors forcing Haredim into their isolation and poverty, only their own cultural and religious commitments. They are therefore not only victims of their current circumstances, but also perpetrators, in the full light of day and of scientific warning.
Rich countries like America and Israel have been rich enough to ignore/appease/tolerate ways of life belligerently at odds with everything modern democratic states stand for; but now that the anti-empirical, anti-state position of the haredim is literally killing us, something surely has to be done. No more bullshit about how it’s only a radical minority within a minority – that obviously doesn’t matter anymore. No more bullshit about how if you’re nice to them eventually they’ll assimilate more and more to normal society. No – as Sam Harris and Haviv Rettig Gur point out, these people believe what they believe, and it ain’t just ideas — it’s salvation.
In the full light of day, to quote Gur, socially destructive ultraorthodox practices must be exposed. We have to stop looking away.
A Virginia bishop who defied warnings about the danger of religious gatherings during the pandemic and vowed to keep preaching “unless I’m in jail or the hospital” died over the weekend after contracting Covid-19.
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“With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die.”
And that’s the only good thing to say about this predictable and pathetic chapter in Israel’s history.
It is not bigotry to suggest that Haredi leaders’ initial disregard for the orders of medical authorities, and their community’s seemingly blind adherence to those leaders, have undermined the painful efforts of everyone else to stem the spread of the virus.
Haredi insularity, Haredi disregard for health authorities during a pandemic, Haredi poverty and population density — all the factors that render them especially vulnerable to the virus, and through them everyone else — are ultimately a choice. There are no external or environmental factors forcing Haredim into their isolation and poverty, only their own cultural and religious commitments. They are therefore not only victims of their current circumstances, but also perpetrators, in the full light of day and of scientific warning.
So, nu?
So don’t hold your breath:
The crisis has sparked a deluge of speculation about the future of Haredi society. Would the rabbis’ manifest and almost wall-to-wall failure to grasp the new situation lead to new skepticism and individualism in the community? Would some question their faith? Would it drive more Haredim to secular education and the job market?
Much of this is wishful thinking on the part of critics who believe their case against the Haredi worldview has just been validated by impartial natural forces. But if that was how religion worked, then as Sigmund Freud once erroneously predicted, there would now scarcely be a religion left on Earth.
Actually, that is the way religion works – for non-cultists. You have your individual life, but you are also part of the body of a church, and you go to certain buildings once a week to worship with people who think the way you do. Ultraorthodoxy, on the other hand, is more of a bizarre hyperexclusive fraternity than a religious body.
To outsiders the term “Haredi” is usually a religious category, but one is hard-pressed to find a specific and agreed-upon theological idea that unites and distinguishes the Haredim. What they share, what defines their society as a distinct subgroup in a broader Israeli and Jewish culture, is a sociological idea.
Indeed, like any reflexively loyalist, outsider cult of no particular theological definition (and therefore no reflective morality outside of what authoritarian leaders tell them), the haredim responded stupidly and viscerally to the pandemic – as they would to anything that comes at them from the outside.
What they are is world-rejectionists; so they did their thing. They rejected the world.
The initial response of Haredi leaders wasn’t a rejection of science, but something less coherent — a stunned refusal, an instinctive rejection of the enormity of what was being asked of it.
It’s hard to think of a more condemnatory judgment of a group of people – a group of people who hold themselves ethically and spiritually superior to everyone else, who pelt with stones eight year old girls and call them whores because their skirts aren’t long enough, and everyone lets them get away with it …
And then there’s this, describing the criminal, er, stunned refusal of a powerful rabbi:
Kanievsky, who would later reverse his position and explain that he hadn’t yet heard about the pandemic when he refused to close the schools, “showed his weakness” as a leader, said [one observer]. “But [in the eyes of haredim] that weakness also reflects his holiness and grandeur, his total investment in the Torah.”
Ya follow? We love him even more because of the pious obliviousness to worldly matters that wiped out our family.
Hey, the health minister himself flouted the rules and got the virus.
Nothing’s ‘incredible’ when your country’s ruled by theocrats.
L’il Jerry’s suin’ everbody.
When my daddy died at seventy-three
He didn’t leave much to Ma and me
Just this old school called Liberty.
Now, I don’t like the story the New York Times did
Bout how we rounded up all the Liberty kids
So when it came out, I told my lawyers Sue.
Elites must o’ thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a’ lots of folk
So I went and sued ProPublica too.
Trespass, defamation, and hatred of the godly
I swear if you just look at me oddly
I’m gonna sue, sue, sue, sue sue.
Once this pandemic has run its course, Israel will begin finally to reckon – to its eternal shame – with its cynical cultivation of huge, fast-growing numbers of violent ignorant religious fanatics. It didn’t have to be this way.
Every day, I thank … my lucky stars? … that as an American Jew, I was born into an actually secular republic, where we can afford to promote religious nut cases to the highest levels of society and everyone will just laugh at them. We laugh at them because they don’t threaten us; because, as Jon Meacham and others point out in regard to the current global crisis, we really do live in Enlightenment Country here. There’s not much good ol’ UD is willing to say about our current president, but the fact that he doesn’t even pretend to give a shit about religion (UD loved watching him cringe as holy rollers put their hands all over him) does speak well for him. When the person running the coronavirus show – Anthony Fauci – tells us he’s left the Catholic church, people don’t head into the streets with pitchforks, run him through, and demand to be led only by a person of faith.
Israelis are immediately, materially, and microbially, threatened by their government-sponsored fanatics; and now, as anyone could have predicted, ultraorthodox neighborhoods are fighting among themselves – a situation of escalating anarchy for which, again, the Israeli state can take a bow.
Significant numbers of secular Israelis have been bailing on that country for some time; secular American and European Jews also have eyes in their heads. You can see, demographically, where this is going.
The situation with Israel’s corona-plagued haredim has sped so far beyond plain ironic that it’s gone supersonic ironic… After decades of hostile self-ghettoization against the modern Israeli state, that country’s scientifically ignorant and belligerently anti-social sects have infected themselves with a disease that threatens them and their non-haredi neighbors existentially. Understandably, the neighbors are constructing physical barriers against these foolish scofflaw communities whose noncompliance with safety measures has brought catastrophe.
[T]he municipality of Ramat Gan put up barricades along its border with the ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak, which has recorded a sharp rise in COVID-19 infections in the last few days and was placed under a government lockdown.
So, respond the haredim: How dare you ghettoize us!
Just because the “silence [of haredi authorities] betrayed and imperiled their community,” that’s no reason enlightened and responsible Israelis have to climb on board a doomed ship of fools and sink with them. They don’t think their raison d’être is to submit to criminally stupid rabbis; they believe in the germ theory of disease and act accordingly. Their misfortune is to have set up shop alongside a wretched medieval outpost that their state, which should above all be about protecting its citizens, has chosen, over decades, to ignore or, worse, to encourage. Now there’s really no way out.
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Lest New Yorkers miss out on the fun.
[T]here’s a deeper issue which makes the Haredim particularly exposed [to coronavirus]. Their deep belief that they can’t be taught anything. There’s nothing new under the sun. That they were always here, learning Torah, and survived despite everything. So don’t tell them about COVID-19 and doctors. They have the best medicine, which science can never improve on. They call it Torah magna u’matlza – Torah protects and saves. But it’s not Torah, it’s the belief in continuity.
Continuity is the biggest ultra-Orthodox myth. Their belief that their way of life is the thousands year-old Jewish tradition, and that all Jews in all time aspired to, until foreign ideas muddled them, was to study Torah their entire lives. Of course, this is an invention.
The Haredi ideology of voluntarily closing their community off from the world is about 200 years old and came about as a reaction to enlightenment and emancipation. The practice of every man studying Torah all day, every day, only exists from the mid-1950s when the concentration of most ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and the U.S. allowed them to live while learning, at poverty-level, but to live, in welfare societies.
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Israel’s largest hospital has now banned haredim from its emergency room.
“When I see a Haredi person, I immediately think he has coronavirus,” a senior health official [comments]. “This is the right thing to do, it is our obligation to do it this way.”
Yes. Well. (Article is subscription only, but all you need is the headline.) UD can’t be the only one who has noted that the word liberty in little Falwell’s fiefdom carries the same value as democratic in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. As she has said repeatedly when writing about religion, subs and doms is the name of the game in many sects, and the more fundamentalist the kinkier. Let me die for you, Master.
It’s quite a luxury for a modern state to maintain – nay, encourage – enormous pockets of pre-modern, anti-state populations. They don’t educate their children; they break national laws because they have no respect for such laws; they impose their thirteenth century sense of how daily life should be lived on a country overwhelmingly either secular or only moderately religious.
In pre-viral times, such populations are a terrible social and fiscal burden; when epidemics occur in communities whose members either don’t know what science is, or disbelieve in it, the luxury of indulging in an experiment to see whether a modern state can sustain itself while allowing massive ignorance and state-hatred to thrive within its borders suddenly reveals itself for the suicidal folly that it has always been.
… mountaintop! Datz me smilin’ behind the king of kings! And now the lord done drug me low! Done turned my smile to a frown!
And, as Liberty University students and faculty continue to assemble, more to come. “None has astroprojected yet,” President Falwell announced yesterday in his weekly Student Morbidity Update, “but as some enter into their last agonies, transforming into icons of the agony of our lord, we will follow with confidence their ascension into heaven. And as the lord through plague conveys his final judgment of all mankind, we ourselves will surely follow after our students into eternal life. As it says in Isaiah: a child will lead them.”
For after all, as our Jewish brethren put it,the pandemic is
“getting us closer to the redemption,” the coming of the Messiah.